Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (27 page)

By the dictates of the never-named supervisor or administrator of political correctness, there are now quite a few words we must be careful never to use. The original intent to stop outright racist, sexist, or homophobic language does nothing to change people’s attitudes and language. The silliness has made fools of those who get carried away with enforcing the extremes. People who are overly sensitive in a serious way and want political correctness enforced have to be insecure and easily intimidated.

The results of the equal rights feminist movement were not all beneficial. Sometimes it meant that women would be subjected to coercive and grueling conditions just as happened to men—like being placed in harm’s way in no-win undeclared wars. Most likely, when the draft becomes necessary and is reinstituted, the rules will dictate that women as well as men will be drafted. This is not an idle threat. All women should remember that if there were no plans for the draft, registration for the draft would have been eliminated a long time ago.

Political correctness has been used in the military to regulate
language used by “tough marines.” Women demand inclusiveness, and yet when offensive language or jokes are told, many will rush to the authorities complaining that they are offended and the “guilty” parties must be reprimanded or punished.

This whole process of political correctness is a danger over and above the social stigma and penalties placed on the “guilty” parties. But it can get worse. Already there have been attempts at banning books and songs that contain words deemed offensive to particular groups. It will not take much for the political correctness movement to target the correctness of political ideas. All totalitarian societies seek to control thoughts and ideas. I have been excluded from certain events because of my “controversial” political views.

We already have laws on the books that require lesser penalties for those who commit crimes against “straight” people because those crimes were not motivated by politically incorrect thinking. The hate police, or the thought police, are entrenched in our legislative and judicial process, and political correctness, though at times it seems silly and frivolous, might well evolve into a federal police effort to maintain order when society becomes unruly in difficult economic times. Maintaining order and safety is the goal at all costs in a totalitarian system. Under those conditions, liberty becomes the enemy.

P
rohibition is not compatible with a free society. Prohibiting acts of violence is one thing, but laws that prohibit the use of certain substances—food, drugs, or alcohol—by adults is a dangerous intrusion on personal liberty. Prohibition is motivated by busybodies who have a gross misunderstanding of the unintended consequences of attempts to improve other people’s habits and character through government force. Time and time again, we are shown that it simply does not work. If there are to be any regulations on the use of certain substances in the United States, it was intended that this should be done by the individual states, not by the federal government.

The experiment with outright prohibition of all alcoholic beverages in the United States started with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment on January 29, 1919. This climaxed a temperance movement that started well before the Civil War. The motivation was to stop drunkenness and the consequences of excessive drinking. Those who promoted prohibition showed no concern for the large majority who drank
alcohol responsibly for enjoyment and whose rights would be violated by prohibition.

To stop the excesses of a few, the many were required to give up their freedom of choice to enjoy a glass of wine or beer. It was rationalized that this sacrifice was legitimate and worthy of government enforcement to improve society as a whole as long as it was endorsed by the majority. Here let us offer some praise for Franklin D. Roosevelt: He ushered in the repeal of Prohibition, an action that won him vast affection from the American people, a true liberalization effort that made the country freer. It is a striking irony that this great day in American history bought him the political capital to bring about the unworkable New Deal, which fastened government control on the country in other ways.

The only good thing about the process was that, in 1919, the American people and the U.S. Congress had enough respect and understanding of the Constitution to know that an amendment was required to authorize Prohibition. This realization prompted the passage of the ill-fated Eighteenth Amendment. Today, the federal government hands down a myriad of “prohibitions” and mandates without the slightest concern about their constitutionality. The entire drug war is an arbitrary prohibition that violates the Constitution, a process that has been going on for nearly seventy-five years. Great harm has occurred since the drug war was accelerated by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.

Alcohol prohibition was destined to wreak havoc on the American people. It bred lawlessness and underworld criminal syndicates, which made huge profits. Prohibiting any desired substance inevitably leads to a black market, as history has
shown countless times, and never achieves its goal of eliminating the use. Since ingredients were no longer readily available, the quality of the alcohol produced by bootleggers led to blindness and death. That was in addition to the many who lost their lives in the violence that occurred in its delivery, just as is happening today in the war on drugs. The appetite for alcohol remained strong despite the effort of the government to enforce its prohibition.

It is quite true that alcohol is a deadly drug when abused. Accidents and illnesses are definitely related to its misuse. Those responsible for the accidents must be held accountable. Those who abuse alcohol and suffer disease or addiction, not the government or the taxpayers, are responsible for their own actions. Furthermore, in the age of growing government medicine, the government (i.e., someone else) must pay the medical bills, so we can be assured that governments local and national will dictate our eating, smoking, drinking, and exercise habits to keep health-care costs down. Give up liberty, and the government will give us good health! Hardly! It never works out that way.

The total failure of alcohol prohibition was an important lesson for many, but there are still too many who do not realize that the harm done by alcohol prohibition was not nearly as bad as what we suffer today with the ill-advised modern war on drugs.

I know a lot of politicians who agree with this position but are convinced that the political risk involved prevents them from trying to change the laws regarding illegal drug use.

My position on the drug war has been known for years, and in spite of my opponents using it against me, it has seemingly
never hurt me in my reelection efforts. And my district is a Bible Belt conservative district. My assessment is that the people are a lot more sophisticated about the issue than the politicians give them credit for. Though they aren’t demanding a total repeal of drug prohibition, they are informed enough not to punish a politician willing to take a forthright position on changing the laws regarding illegal drugs.

In Texas, it’s common knowledge that the current wars on the Mexico-Texas border are, to a large extent, about drugs. Ironically, the two strongest groups that want to maintain the status quo of prohibition are the drug dealers and many Christian conservatives—two groups with opposite motivations but who share a common interest in keeping the drug war going.

At the federal level, the cost to pursue the drug war in the past forty years runs into hundreds of billions of dollars. The social cost, including the loss of civil liberties, is incalculable. Crime relating to the drug laws far surpasses the crime related to the fifteen years of alcohol prohibition. I expect that someday the country will wake up and suddenly decide, as we did in 1933, that prohibition to improve personal behavior is a lost cause, and the second repeal of prohibition will occur. This is more likely now than ever before because of the growing perception that the federal government is inept and that individual states must reassert themselves in order to provide more sensible government to their citizens. The Tenth Amendment is in the process of being reborn.

But even with signs that more Americans are becoming aware of the senselessness of the war on drugs, we have local and national politicians demanding even more control, and over much more benign substances such as fatty foods, raw milk,
and salt. The idea that in a free society each individual decides for himself what is good or bad and what is risky is completely foreign to the patronizing moralizers who are now in control. But because most of them are users of alcohol, they never bring up the subject of alcohol prohibition anymore. I was rather shocked, after working with a progressive on lightening penalties for marijuana use, that I was met with great resistance to my suggestion that we permit raw milk to be sold without government restrictions. He was convinced that the people would need government protection from this “danger.”

That’s why the basic principle of freedom of choice with responsibility for one’s actions solves a lot of dilemmas when it comes to the proper role of government in our lives.

Most Americans fail to recognize that throughout most of our history drug laws didn’t exist. There’s reliable evidence that the laws have done nothing to decrease drug usage while contributing significantly to street crime. Responsibility for teaching about the dangers of drugs falls principally on parents. Parents teach children about the dangers of highways, high places, stoves, household poisons, swimming pools, etc. It’s their responsibility to warn about all dangers, including alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and bad diets.

Government should not compel or prohibit any personal activity when that activity poses danger to that individual alone. Drinking and smoking marijuana is one thing, but driving recklessly under the influence is quite another. When an individual threatens the lives of others, there is a role for government to restrain that violence.

The government today is involved in compulsion or prohibition of just about everything in our daily activities. Many
times these efforts are well intentioned. Other times they result from a philosophic belief that average people need smart humanitarian politicians and bureaucrats to take care of them. The people, they claim, are not smart enough to make their own decisions. And unfortunately, many citizens go along, believing the government will provide perfect safety for them in everything they do. Since governments can’t deliver, this assumption provides a grand moral hazard of complacency and will only be reversed with either a dictatorship or a national bankruptcy that awakens the people and forces positive changes.

Thornton, Mark. 1991.
The Economics of Prohibition
. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

I
n a free society, the land is owned by the people, not the government. We started out rather well in our early history, and a reasonable precedent was set for the land east of the Mississippi. Even today, federal ownership of the land in the eastern third of the United States is minimal, but there’s a steady effort by the authoritarians in Congress to continually increase federal ownership of land across the entire country.

The development of the West was quite different. After annexation, federal government policy was always to retain ownership of most of the land even after statehood was granted. Government management of land is atrocious. Management of the commons, whether it’s grazing or mining, proves to be bureaucratic, inefficient, and serving the special interests. Usually the choice is between picking beneficiaries of government policy or prohibiting any development. Rarely is it considered to turn the land over to the states for the purpose of its being sold. Since we didn’t need the federal government to manage or own the lands east of the Mississippi for worthwhile development, why should it be necessary for the
government to own the land west of the Mississippi and stifle progress?

Total federal ownership is more than one third of the land mass of the fifty states. But that’s not the only problem for those who believe in private ownership of land. Taxation and regulations are so cumbersome that landowners are essentially renters with no rights to the land. If taxes are not paid, the land is quickly taken by the state. School taxes are especially onerous throughout the country—with little to show for them. Regulations governing land use, from local to federal governments, makes developing land horribly difficult. Cities and their surrounding jurisdictions, counties, and states, all must give their approval before an owner can proceed to make use of his land. This is so even if there is no threat to a neighbor’s property. Each jurisdiction has many overlapping regulations.